The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 372: Jimmy Failla Loves Fat Elvis

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

The former New York cabby, current stand-up comic, and perennial philosopher talks hilariously about why he's keeping politics out of his new show Fox News Saturday Night, why he wrote his bestselling book, Cancel Culture Dictionary, and why he looks at the world like a drug-sniffing dog at the airport.

Hello, friends. What you have here is another episode of The Way I heard it. Technically, it's number 372, according to Chuck. But from what I can tell, you're the only one left on the planet. Who cares? I care deeply, Mike, about just about everything. But I just don't want you to say the wrong number, like what happened with the Neil McDunner episode that's out currently. Exactly. And I was looking through all the people who complained about it. You know what I found? No.

Nothing. No complaints. I don't feel like you looked hard enough. Honestly. Friends, the important thing is the episode is called Jimmy Fala loves Fat Elvis. Because he does. And we love Jimmy Fala. If you're unfamiliar with this guy, well, you're going to be. He's a regular over at Fox News, but don't hold that against him.

Really, he's a comedian by way of driving a cab. He drove a cab for eight years, this guy. He is all about work ethic. I mean, what he told us about his routine when he was driving for 12 hours and what he else he was doing, you know, to be a stand-up comic. Writing every morning from like 3 to 5 a.m., getting up, driving 12 hours in a cab in New York City, going home to his wife, whose enormous feet come up in this conversation. It's pretty funny. Don't bring her feet into it. He dragged Fat Elvis into it.

I can drag his wife's feet into it because he brought it up. Okay. I ran into Jimmy like a year ago when I was promoting the scholarship over at Fox. And as you'll hear in our conversation, I watched him. You know, he didn't know I was watching him. He was in a makeup chair in a lonely part of the building, getting some pancakes slathered on to his pasty face. And he was so nice. He was so nice to the makeup girl.

And he had her laughing. He treated her like I think he treats his audiences. And I just thought, I kind of like this guy. And I kept seeing him pop up on different shows. And last week I was in town, and he has a brand new show on Saturday nights called Fox Saturday Night with Jimmy Phala. And he has a brand new book called Cancel Culture Dictionary, which is very funny. And the more I get to know him, the more I like him, I'm convinced you will as well, no matter what your feelings might be regarding skinny Elvis or Fat Elvis or Hollywood Elvis or

peanut butter and jelly sandwich Elvis or whatever it is. He thinks a lot this guy. He really does, you know? And I've always said comedians are among the most annoying and the smartest people I know. But he's way more smart and way less annoying. I like his book. I like his show. I like him.

And I'm betting you will too. Because who doesn't love Fat Elvis with Jimmy Phelan right after this? Do do you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle.

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And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at NetSuite. dot com slash mike that's net sweet dot com are we good oh fantastic boom hello james how about it is it james officially it's james on my taxi license really and that sounds fan like if you hear james yeah you think you're in a much nicer car than a yellow ford-crowse god rome victoria like james should be driving you into like a rose royce you know right yeah right james home james yeah exactly

Exactly, but people would like doing that because James is the right name for that. You need a one-syllable name, so I would get a lot of that. Middle name? Robert. Very traditional. Yep, for sure. Yeah. And Fallia, where do you hail from?

What's the etymology? I'd technically be Sicilian. And you pronounce it the way every anchor on Fox News pronounces it. Yeah. It's Fela. Yeah, yeah. Of course. But everyone, you know what happened to the Fox News, which is funny?

Everybody wants to, when you come on the air and you're new, they want to get things right, as you'd imagine. Sure. but if they hear another anchor pronounce it a certain way, they're like, oh, if I've been doing it wrong the whole time? Right, right, right. And now your name is, you know, I'm just going with Smith when we launch my show.

It'll be easy. I feel like I owe it to these people. So first things first. Congratulations. I was telling Chuck earlier after we met a couple of days ago, not for the first time, but I did a little segment on your show.

Did you ever? And I said to Chuck, you know something? I think we ought to grab this guy on the way up. Not that he's going to be coming down anytime soon, but he's certainly going up. And I've got a lot of questions about what that might feel like. But it was funny this morning I was out on the bike path doing my research, which really consists of me saying your name into my phone

and seeing if anything interesting pops up so I can listen to whatever it is. Which way did you say it? Well, I said Jimmy Phala and up came Jimmy Fallon. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that probably won't be the case in a couple of months. But right now, Siri with a capital S, hasn't yet learned that you're coming. Well, that's my favorite thing about being me is on the way up, when you're doing comedy, like you start off in like, Obeian Dens.

You know what I mean? And, you know, people would come in and be like, oh, I thought it was Jimmy Fallon. And I'm like, do you realize what a precipitous nose dive is career? I mean, sign me up right now to be. on the behind the music episode that he's in. Right. Because how glorious and spectacular that collapse would have to be for him to be here at the Yapank Firehouse at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night.

I'm with the guy. Oh, the worm turns. Man. Sidebar, but behind the music, man, how great an idea was that? And what kind of footprint did that leave in your own sort of cultural zeitgeist? So here we go. I consider behind the music to be inspired, whether they realize it or not, by Fat Elvis.

I'm a big fan of Fat Elvis. Well, who's not? Oh, thank you. Well, said. America. Okay. It's all we got left, guys, is Fat Elvis. Because the truth is fat Elvis, okay, is the tail end of this thing.

You get the rise, the posted stamp Elvis, Ed Sullivan's show. They can't show him from the waist down. He's too sexy. You know, everybody talks about how Elvis was so sexy in 56, like they couldn't let the women look at him. Don't even get me started on the men because you've never seen anything. I mean, what Elvis was doing. You know, everybody else was standing still strum on his bar.

So Fat Elvis, as you know, is the downhill trajectory of what we're describing here. Exactly. And that's basically that story gives you that perfect Ian and Yang. And there's something so fascinated about getting both ends of it. And I think that's what behind the music is ultimately so appealing for. It's you get this person when they're one of us. You see them ascend to the height of all heights. And then suddenly they're one of us again.

But to get from there to one of us again, a lot's got to be mishandled. And that's where the entertainment comes from. It's not 180. It's the perfect circle. I mean, to die on the toilet in such an inglorious way. I mean, perfect. I saw something the other day on the Internet. It was Elvis at the absolute height of his charismatic appeal.

And they were filming him singing Viva Las Vegas, but without the music. So he comes out like a star walking into a saloon in an old Western, just bowl. Oh, and the doors open. And he's making sounds, but he's lip-syncing, right? But what you hear, the... But he's selling it and everything. And in that moment, I was like, man, what a sport. He was still on the way up.

All the way. So Elvis mattered, behind the music matters. Does music in general matter? Do you care? A music guy, and I grew up in a big joke house. This is interesting. Everyone in my family, but me as a cop. All my brothers, my dad, my uncle,

I would have been a cop if it weren't for this thing called a background check. It was a consideration. And then they were like, so we're going to be looking into it. And I was like, gentlemen, thanks for your time. I'm going to get out of here. It's a long season. It's a long season. Nobody goes undefeated.

That's all I can tell you. So I grew up in a big joke house, a lot of jokey cops. And comedy was how we kind of expressed our affection. New York? New York. So we're Sicilian. I'm half Sicilian. in my mom's side, full-blooded Polish.

So half-Cissilian and half Polish. As the story goes, I had an uncle who put out a hit on himself. Good night, everybody. Get out, I got to go. But anyway. Sicilian and Sicilian and Polish. So we had a big comedy family, big food family, because the Poles eat, the Sicilians eat. But we were a very jokey family.

Now, I grew up around street jokes, which is why when we were talking in New York recently, I asked you if you knew any street jokes and you told a phenomenal street joke, and I really appreciated that. Because that's what my family was built on. Yeah. guys walk into a ball, you know, that kind of stuff. Shaggy dogs. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, like, right, that I'd like a joke that'll take its time. Yep. And if you tell it right, yep, the stuff that precedes the punchline should be a little funnier for the punchline, right?

Yeah, in a weird way. Right. I have a joke like that that you might have heard that we might close on or middle on or whatever you'd request. I'm a party clown. I'm here from the, it's whatever you're in the juggling, whatever you need. Well, we don't have what they call in the industry a, um, what is it, a format. No. No. You know, you know, Really. I had no idea. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I love you, man. Well, what's going on with your new show? Based on what we did, and again, quick sidebar, I'm in New York, a couple days ago. We're flogging the foundation. and suddenly, you know, word gets out to producers call. And I'm like, oh, Jimmy's got a new show.

And I didn't know where they were taking me, but I wound up on the, I think, like the 10th floor of the main building. And it's the electrical hub of, like, most of 6th Avenue. Yeah, yeah. It's just dense pipes, multicolored, like you can't walk on the grates. And you were all set up there. And I'm like, I can't believe this is a set. But obviously it's not.

where you wanted to talk to me. Because dirty jobs, et cetera. Hey, girl. We're trying to make good TV. So in addition, you know, something we try to do in our show, which is basically my entire programming ethos. This matters. It's based on the Motown Museum.

Now, I know nobody likes a show off, but I once got booked to do stand-up in Flint, Michigan at three in the afternoon. And I don't mean to come in here and pistol whip you with my prosperity. Get the bottled water. Wow. I was at Flint, Michigan. I believe I was being paid. in Arby's.

But we were in Flint, Michigan, and after that afternoon college gig, we went to the Motown Museum, and I learned the Barry Gordy's story, and it really, this is very serious, inspired everything I do. So what Barry Gordy was doing in 57 when he launched Motown

is he had run a record store and crashed it into the ground once because he thought he knew better than the customer, and he was like, all these kids, all they want is money, waters, I'm going to sell them real jazz. And he'd sold it, well he was working on the Ford Motor Plant a year later because the record store went under.

But he had an affinity for music and he continued as the story goes to write music to the beat of the assembly line, ultimately borrow money from his sister, make a hit song for Jackie Wilson that paid nothing because if you didn't own the publishing, you didn't get paid. So that's kind of what motivated the beginning of Motown. Wait, wait. Are you saying that Motown in its roots has a direct line to the assembly line? Yeah, straight up. And they tell you that in the museum. They'll tell you that in the Motown Museum. Barry Gordy, when he took his sister's $1,000 to found Motown. And it's such a good American story because Motown's a billion-dollar entity now. But imagine when you were sitting down with that thousand, and that thousand had to work, or you're going back to the plant.

Okay, they devised a strategy to make their products stickier than everybody else's. Okay, hear me out. There are like a lot of people can sing, but do they sing and dance? All right, some of them do? Do they have matching satin outfits? sat in outfits? Okay, a few of them do. Do they have custom nine second intros to every song

that distinguish them on the radio? Like, if you think of a song like, I want you back by the Jackson Five, it starts with that humongous piano. So that's what they were doing. Right. And they essentially just made their product so sticky that if you ran into it,

you are always like shaking your head yes. You're building a yes staircase. And that's how they distinguished themselves. So I was, that was 2015. I was day drunk coming back from a Flint, Michigan gig, which was hard to get. to because my GPS kept telling me to fire my agent. It was like, in three miles, just pull over it.

You're better than this. I'm like, are you a GPS telling me? Like, you deserve more. But I had devised a strategy from that moment forward to make content stickier. So when they started putting me on Fox, you know, you go on Fox to do a TV hit. You're on for three minutes. It's so funny on TV because it really is an assembly line. The reason I love this format is we could actually talk.

Sure. On TV, you're on TV, there's a other story competing with you under the screen and a picture of the guy who's coming up next to you. That's right. I'm like, what are we even doing here? A lot of faith in this. You know, speaking of assembly lines, you know, apparently they spent some time there as well. So I started to make, you know, with the plan of making these three-minute hits sticky. So I was wearing louder sport coats.

And some of that was to distract from my glaring lack of intellect because I don't have a background in politics at the time. But then the rest of it was, you know, be joking. be fun, have a good energy, do things when you don't have the ball. Meaning if they're talking, okay, I don't have to be, you know, waving a flag or something like that, but contribute. Be present. Yeah, contribute an energy. Be a force multiplier or positive energy.

Because what I think the hook in life is, and I think this goes bigger than broadcasting and everything else, is you really got to look at the world. I mean, I know I do like you're a dog with a job. And what I mean by that is, you know when you go to the airport and the dog who sniffs the bags is always wagging his tail in a good mood. He can't believe. they're counting on him to save the plane. He cannot believe.

He's like, wait, I'm saving the plane. Yeah. And that's my vibe in every set I walk onto. I'm like, I can't believe I'm saving the plane. And that's like, and I will. Provided no one throws a tennis ball right now. I'm good. So.

Or squirrel runs by. It's working. Let me tell you why you're here for what it's worth. Yeah, we had a nice interview the other day. And yeah, I've seen you on the TV. And I have seen you throwing out the energy in that soul-deadening three-minute crucible. of irrelevance. I get it. And to our earlier point, if a good joke ought to be measured by the story that precedes the punchline, and if a three-minute hit is nothing but a punchline, then you

don't have the best part of a story, you don't have the best part of a joke, and you don't really learn anything other than, you know, the old tweets with those limited characters and so forth and so forth. But you're here because about a year ago, and I don't know if you'll remember this, but I think the first time I saw you, you were in makeup. Yep. It was in that studio where, oh, crap, I was just... They probably do Varney. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Varney, right?

So you're there, and I kind of look around the corner. I'm like, oh, that's Jimmy. I'd seen you at a Patriot Award, I think. Yeah, yeah, probably that year. And you were talking to the makeup girl, and you were telling her a story. And it was exactly as if you were telling a story in front of 400 people. Wow.

Like, you were really talking to her. I don't know if you're really newer or not. And every time I've seen you since then, including just the other day backstage with your own crew, you seem to be, I mean, I can't come up with a better metaphor than the drug sniffing dog, but you seem to be incredibly amused

by this trip you're on and really curious about what good thing's going to happen next. So don't lose that, man. No, no. Because it's the first thing. It's the one that goes. It's the first thing to go. It's not your hair.

It's not your friends. It's the curiosity-fueled wonder of don't lose it. That's it. I think what you mean is that it's the first thing that they beat out of you. If you let them. If you let them. It's the first point of contact on the pinata. It's so funny that you say that.

Because what I've noticed in the shift from being a guest just in the infancy stages of the show is your life is already just a little more managed than you're used to it being. Yes. And as a former cab driver and a comedian, spontaneity is everything that powers this rocket. Because it's about trusting your average. I don't show up with something to say. You show up if you want to succeed, I think, in television as a listener. Two ears, one mouth.

We're supposed to do. A lot of people don't know that. That's why it's hard for people to do comedy in a cable news format because they show up with jokes, but you don't always tell them in the right spot. They're like, who's this guy? Right. I'll tell you a funny story when I was first getting going. at Fox and learning that lesson the hard way, I was on with a news anchor and made the reference

that it was a throwaway joke. It was like Kamala Harris ran for president. At the time she dropped out, she was polling behind ISIS. And the poor news anchor just couldn't fathom that humor would be inserted into this moment was like, just so our viewers understand, we're not familiar with the poll Jimmy's referencing. And I'll never out the person. It was like three years ago, but it was someone I like and I felt so bad. Sure. Because it was like, you know, in the NBA, a crossover drivel where they like break the guy's ankles because he's not ready to go that way. And I felt so bad. So I became a little more mindful of where the jokes go because that matters too.

Well, and you've got to be mindful too. And I apologize that you're sipping your coffee out of a mug with my face on it. No, everyone told me you're going to do Roe, the narcissist. I was like, no, he's not a narcissist. And then I got here and they handed me a mug with his face on it. That's marketing. This is narcissism. He's drinking it too.

I'm drinking out of my own face. He wasn't even thirsty. He just wanted to see the mug. If you're curious, the mugs are available at microworks.org, I believe. No, we're not even selling them? We bought like six of them, and three of them we broke. Oh, crap. Well, congratulations.

You can take it if you want. That's a keepsake. Where was I in the... Jimmy, people, curiosity, wonder. We were talking about TV. Yeah, and Chuck's point is how they can ring it out of you if you let them. And the thing I'm also interested about, Like all of a sudden, I mean, Fox is such a unique.

It's its own place. Yeah. It's not unique because CNN and MSNBC are equally unique in different ways. Yep. Right? But, you know, in the wake of Tucker, so many viewers, and I know a lot of people over there are all, like, they're licking their finger and they're sticking it in the air to see which way the wind's blowing. And it's really hard to know how to navigate in a world where, so like I think a Gutfeld, and I'm looking at you and I see these paths. look at Kilmead, these utility players. And I look at the success stories. And well, there's O'Reilly,

but there he goes. And there's Tucker. And there he went. And there's Megan. And there they go. And there's Glenn Beck. And oh, so like what happens in your world when your brand and your own success begins to eclipse the overarching? Well, what a lot of people have to know is Fox is actually owned by Minuto. And at a certain age, you have to leave the band. and they bring in like five new Tejano singers. We sing a lot there. You don't see it on the air, but that's what we do. I mean, I certainly dress like this is true.

So let me just make clear that it's not. I think my concern, and again, this is the part of the me that's new. Okay? So I'm still self-aware enough to be mindful of how I'm impacting the consumer. I haven't thought long term, but I've thought a lot about things that get said to me like this. Because, for instance, the last big star to leave the channel, you said, Tucker. at stand-up shows during a Q&A. Someone yells out like,

you should get Tucker's spot. I'm like, we're in the parking lot? What are we talking about? I'm like, I get painted mozzarella sticks right now. I'm like, there's no... But it's my favorite thing about this business is that people really have such an affinity

for the broadcasters that connect with them that they expect you to feel and process things the same way they do. So one of my favorite things in the world, and this has happened to me twice, big name people have left the channel and people have said to me you should quit out of solidarity

and I'm like dude he's making 30 million a year I'm selling pictures of my wife's feet on only fans and just so everybody understands they're my feet I'm just using her profile picture because she's a lot prettier I feel so cheated now I know what I'm cancel

I can't see back on hell you guys feel so dirty Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just 3490. a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind.

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and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. But so when you talk about, oh, there's a day where you could get back. I genuinely can't fathom that, but I want to entertain it since you've asked the question. Because it's been so incremental to get from there to hear that I know this would seem like it's happening fast. But you don't feel the rate of speed. You know what I mean?

It's like, spot on. Life goes fast when you look back at what you were doing 20 years ago. But the last 20 years didn't go fast. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You know, I was driving for real. So you drive a cab, you drive it in two 12-hour shifts, either days or nights, okay? I was a day guy.

Now, the hook is at night, a lot less traffic. During the day, nobody throws up in your cab, okay? But you do get crazier people. Like, anybody can get in bombed at two in the morning, but it takes a real winter to get it at 1118 a.m. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. That's a pro drinker right there. Which reminds me, I thought you looked familiar, you know, that whole thing, that whole thing.

But I was driving a camp full-time, about seven years, where I was driving 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. I was doing stand-up at night. Okay, but prior to going to work in the morning, my buddy, Dean Imperial, he writes for a couple of shows. Right now he's writing for Godfather or Harlem, as far as Whitaker's show. But he's the guy I started with. And because of our limited access to writing and working, we had to meet up before my taxi shifts. So I, for about seven years, I had a 2.30 alarm clock. I'd get on the one train, which if you get on the one train, which if you get on,

the subway at 2.30 in the morning, you're in someone's house. You're going to see some things. No, you're not on mass transit. Like, you feel like I should have showed up with a bunt cake because they live there. Okay, people are sleeping. It's a whole not of odd. But I would go down to Deans and we would write from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. And then we'd go down to the garage, drive for 12 hours. But the gravity of the creative process and that determination to get somewhere like this made it like manic and fun. And I loved it. But the point is, because the days were that insane, they did not go fat. You know what I'm saying? They It was a different type of thing.

Like they're saying shawl shank, you know, time stretches out in here like a blade. No, dude. It's funny. I actually drove with a rock hammer just in case. New York to New York. Wow. So, okay, wait. But if it were to get to a point, as you said, what happens when you were bigger than the channel?

I couldn't fathom being there. But the truth is what I'm trying to be for a lot of society is a course correction. I don't want to live in a world where I'd ever have to leave. someplace that was gracious enough to afford me the opportunity. And it's like what I'm trying to do at my show. You know, my show doesn't do politics. We didn't know politics. Like, we don't, you know, and no gotches.

People were surprised when I was being interviewed. I recently did a profile in Forbes, where, oddly enough, he didn't have his picture on the face of the mug. That's weird. Steve Forbes, he can't afford it. I'm like, Steve, I'm like, are you even getting this magazine published this month? What's going on here? I'll make a call.

Yeah, you better get Steve O' on the line as I call him. But they were talking to me about the launch of my show. And I said, this is a phrase. I've used a lot on TV lately. You know, comedy, for real. Real comedy doesn't have a party. Comedy is a party. You know what I mean?

So it's not Republican. It's not Democrat. Like the old game shows used to be like the Hollywood squares. It was just you were a fly on the wall of a really interesting room. Awesome. And that's what I want to be. I want to be the type of show that kind of breaks the mold from the standpoint of we can all hang out again. Because what I think people are screwing up at the tippy top of media specifically and in Hollywood is,

we have it really good. And I don't think there's any reason for us to compromise this or our standing with the public. Like I always say this about the Oscars. I'm not mad that they're getting political because I might disagree with some of their points. I'm just mad that they're doing it at all. Because the joke is you people hit the genetic lottery.

Right. You're so gorgeous that we'll pay $30 for a popcorn to watch you recite the words that were written for you by an ugly person. You understand? And it's like, you've got it, dude. You're making $30 million to pretend you're an astronaut. You know, you're working a few weeks at a time.

Why would you ever jeopardize your good standing with anyone who might buy one of those popcorns? What did you think when you saw Jervais on the Golden Globes go all in? Oh, he's not coming back. That was my first thought, naturally. But I think it would serve them to get there. And I don't doubt that they could embrace this again because they were a little bit less political. the award shows because they realize it's become a little toxic for the brand. Yeah.

Because we're supposed to be providing escapism. And I never tell anybody like, stay in your lane. Okay, you got a platform, use it wherever the way you want. But the people who work in music and sports and entertainment can help the country a lot more by being music and sports and entertainment because it gives us common culture. You have to understand what the lane is you're being told to inhabit. Yeah. I saw you say something during my research earlier today.

You said something about our friend Jay Leno, which I thought was really smart. First of all, if there's a Mount Rush more of comedy, he's up there somewhere. He paid his dues and he did his thing. But is he pulling his punches today by saying, you know what? I'm just not going to talk about politics at all because that's not the kind of room. I want to run and I don't want half the people to want to know what the punchline is before I get there so they can decide if I suck or not. Yeah. And what I think he's really saying is back to the point of him being on the comedy Mount Rushmore, he doesn't need the aggravation. He doesn't. Okay, he's like, I don't want to deal

with this. And I totally respect that because at the end of the day, people want to laugh more than they want to agree. You know, you go to the comedy club to laugh. You don't show up because you're like, I want to make sure this guy votes the way I do. And I think that's where a comedy got a little poisoned in late night is the agenda is very transparent. You know, a lot of people make the comparison to Carson about you never knew where he stood. You weren't supposed to. Okay, it was just mindless escapism. And I think what Leno is saying in that moment is he wants to be in the escapism business. He doesn't want to be in the, you know, political pugilism business. So I get it. What my frustration is with big name comics though, who are like,

well, you know, the mob, the outrage, is you do make it harder on the little people when you agree to the rules of engagement that the censorship barrage is bringing to the battle. That's why I appreciate Chappelle. Yeah. Because this is a thing. A lot of people don't know this. Okay. The people who suffer the most from like cancel culture are not the celebrities.

Roseanne gets canceled. Roseanne has 80s sitcom money. She's going to be okay. I'm going to go out on a limb and say she's blown some of it on pills. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe just ibuprofen. I don't know.

You know, at that age, you go to the pharmacy. Okay. Osympic. I know. So I laugh, okay, because they get. canceled, but by accepting that as a society, we've now co-signed a rule change. You can't do that thing anymore that they did. You know, that mindless 2 a.m., someone got stone and told a stupid joke. I could never endorse what she said, okay, but she wasn't behaving in that moment any differently

than how she made her fame. So here's a theory that I've had, and I love to get your take as a comedian before I shamelessly fillate your book, Counsel Culture Dictionary, which is, you know, and full disclosure. We talk about the topic a lot on here with PhDs who write much thicker books. Yeah, yeah. Who have got all the research. But they're not scratching sniff? Wait.

It's not a pop-up either. Awkward. Oh, crap, there I go again. What was it going to say, Chuck? You were going to talk about the book. You said the thing I want to say before I started to play your book. We were talking about comedy theory and rules of engagement and everything like that. Oh, right.

So there's a difference between Leno and Carson running a show where at the end of a long day, 20, 30 million people sit down. to be in a room that makes them comfortable versus Chappelle going out into the world, you going out into the world. And I worry, like comics get good, like most people get good, they fail. And when they fail, historically,

they failed in front of small groups, right? Lenny Bruce wasn't killing it until he was killing it. He had to blow up in these little clubs. You got a little better, a little better, a little better. Now the audience is all armed, right? With the phones, with the cameras. So how did you navigate that? And like that learning curve becomes a right angle of humiliation.

How do you get better when you're always everywhere? Well, here's the truth. For stand-up, I think the most important thing is that the audience knows you're bargaining with them in good faith. So even my stand-up special, which is on Fox Nation, I open by explaining to the audience, 83% of what I say tonight would get me fired on TV. So I'm buying myself the currency to say, Set the bar. Comedy's escapism.

Jokes aren't hate crimes. It's a chance to treat each other like adults for two hours, okay, and just laugh or don't laugh. I always say comedy should be treated like a buffet. If you see a joke you like, you throw it on the tray. If you don't like the joke,

no need to get upset. Keep walking. We all get our own tray. You're not supposed to hold up the line and argue with the chef about the macaroni and cheese. Just don't eat the macaroni and cheese. You know what I mean?

But that's what this has become because in a lot of ways it's incentivized. Like, I'm not one of those people who thinks everybody gets offended. too easy. I actually think there's just currency in saying you're offended. And I think we're on the other side of this hill now. I think in the beginning of cancel culture, okay, we didn't know what it was because social media was new. Okay. And, you know, because it was happening with such a force and fury because the whole world was, you know, tethered together, it was terrifying CEOs into making

decisions because there's an omnipotence to a cancel. It's like the whole world is just tweeting, this guy's the devil. And in those 48 hours, you feel like you owe them a deliverable. If you're the corporation who wants the press to go away, so bang, there went the sitcom. But over the course of time,

what we came to see is none of the cancels went back to actually help the aggrieved class of people. Like a good example I'll give you. So we whacked Native American mascots in the NFL. But do you think once they changed

the halftime show, anyone showed up to a reservation and was like, how can we help? No, because it's not activism. It's slacktivism. It's a superficial win. It's a virtue of signal. Thank you.

So to navigate what you just described is this has been going on for about 10 years in my comedy career, that the ground started to shift in terms of how people took in comedy. Definitely because of social media, definitely because of the smartphone. But what I had going for me in the last seven or eight years, they didn't know who I was. So I didn't have to worry about anyone getting upset because they don't get upset at the guy who's playing the chuckle hut in Parsipone because there's no currency to be gained. go after Chappelle because the relevance comes from the big name. So now I'm at a place where that's a little different, but I've also cultivated my own

following. So for the most part, I'm in a safe space. But I'll give you an example of how I'm not. So the other night on Watersworld, we're talking about going out to dinner with your spouse. Sorry, but any story that starts like that is going to have a twist at the end. The other night on Watersworld. It's going to be fine. we're on Jesse's show and we're covering a story about going out to dinner with your spouse

and how you can trick women into just being agreeing because now women, you know, what do you want to eat? I don't know, you pick it. And my argument is the reason that frustrates us is we want passion. We want you to be excited about where we're going. You know, and I'm like, eh, really? Pizza. You know what I mean?

So that's the hook. So Jesse goes, that's why I just pick it. I go, no, I'm the opposite. I said, I give my Jenny fail, it gets a say. I go, if she makes weight and we go out to dinner on. Friday. Okay. She gets the pick. Now this is like a running joke in our family and Jenny's on my radio show a lot so she knows it. But like a left wing media site just clips it and is like, you know, Fox News host says his wife only gets fed if she makes weight. And I was like, we're in a new

ballgame, Jimbo. Here we are. I was like, wow. It's like everything is a bargain. And for me, I run this foundation and a lot of people. donate a bunch of money and we give away these scholarships. And part of the reason is because I'll go on Fox and I'll tell stories about people who have mastered a skill that's in demand and went on to prosper and so forth and so on. That's why I go on. I used to go on to promote shows and stuff, but not much anymore. This is sort of my thing.

And there's a show I do on Fox business. And so they always tie it back to that. But they always get me, man. And it's never the show. Yeah. It's the parenthetical. Yeah, aside. Okay.

So, I mean, like in this last run, I mentioned in past, that college degrees used to be a mark of great accomplishment and achievement. And now a lot of people have said that given all the scandal, given all the anti-Semitism, given the $51 billion in endowments, given the fact that a GPA at Harvard today, on average is 3.8 and it was 2.5 in 1955, given all these things, the inflation credential, etc., etc., a lot people, they're taking their degrees off the wall because they're shameful. Yeah. Headline.

I got it right here. Mike Roe says four-year degrees no longer resonate with pride. They're shameful. Mike Roe doesn't mean much anymore to have college-educated people. I mean, like that headline. Yeah. They get more traction out of a parenthetical after the fact than they have an audience on the show. A thousand percent.

And look, you want to be a good guest. Yeah. You want to say things that sort of rhyme and you want to be interesting. But when you look at them transcribed in a headline, you're just a schmuck. You're just a big mouth, you know? But that is the thing I don't want to contribute to. Like working in cable news specifically, that's what I'm... Felya doesn't want to contribute.

Not interested in contributing. Wife has giant hobbit food and could lose 30 or 40 pounds. Yeah. Doesn't let her choose where to eat. Yeah. Just chew you. your food, wench. It's like, it's like, it's like, but I mean, I laugh so hard because like when you stand behind

the internet magician and see where the rabbit goes and it's like, and this is the part that drives me crazy. We talk about mindfulness. None of these people care about like the toxic effect they're having on the world because they're selling bile, but they're not selling authentic bile. That's a manipulation. It's like a movie review. You know what I mean?

When you read a movie review, you know, You know what I mean? You're like, oh, the guy who wrote this movie should be in the gas chamber. They should have did airplane two. That was funny. And then the movie review was like, that was funny. And you're like, wait, what? That's, I thought, you know.

No, we're not laughing at that this week. So what are you more interested in right now? The show, that's brand new or your new book. I mean, what's... Do you know what I'm dealing with for real? No. So the show and the book came out at the same time. Oh, you poor bastard.

No, no, I know. Because in that regard, it's like you also realize you're peaking in life right now. Back to the behind the music thing. We're on the biggest billboards in Times Square right now. You know, a billboard I sat under in traffic for probably a million hours in my adult life, a billboard where I handed out comedy tickets to get into the Hot Comedy Club in like 2002 to see your face up there. What's it feel like? It's bizarre, but as a New Yorker, it doesn't feel real because there's no X-rated graffiti.

You know what I mean? I'm like, can someone put a dong on my cheek or something so we can make this happen? It's not. But it really has blown my mind, but in that moment, you can measure the distance of the jury. journey. And in that moment, you also think about this conversation we're having about how so many more people are seeing you. And again, I'm still clinging to that thing of like, all right, so how do you use this? And I'm trying to use it for good. You know, in Pulp Fiction, when Samuel Jackson's like, it's hard being the shepherd, man. I'm trying to be the shepherd. We're trying real hard.

To be the shepherd. We got a new headline, too, Phelah wants a dong on his cheek. There it is. Okay. So then I kind of feel like, we should go back to the cab thing. Let's go. I'll talk to you about anything. Well, you said that you don't, like in the way that Tucker and Megan and O'Reilly and Beck all suddenly found themselves leaving the very thing, right? And you said, you can't imagine that happening to you. But in relative terms, the cab thing is its own world. And you left it.

And the cop thing in your family, there's a lot of genetic inertia behind. that. Yep. Not for you. Yeah. You've passed through these worlds. I have no idea how you think about your stand-up or is it a means to an end or like, is it the core?

Like what informs the direction that you've taken? I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company. was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic, and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise,

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don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. E-Haw. So my goal is a kid. Okay, my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Pascana, said to go home and watch the tonight show. She said, they ask your parents to stay up late, watch the tonight show. You have like an affable way about you. I think you could host one of those shows.

Your parents will get it. That's great. That's a good teacher right there. Mrs. Pascana. And, listen, she might have been saying it because she saw my report cards. It was like, ooh, good luck. Stop reading. Have you thought about the circus, Jimmy?

Anyway, so I started watching The Tonight Show in fifth grade and wanted to be what I am. I wanted to be a comic, and I knew I needed a bigger platform besides comedy to create an audience for my comedy. In the 80s during the comedy boom, they were like, this guy's funny, let's throw him in a movie. Now it's the opposite. They're like, this guy's in a movie. Maybe we should write him a comedy act. Yeah. You know, so when like Gilbert Godfrey was in Beverly Hills cop or Eddie was exploding onto SNL, they were comics first.

And comedy, if it is your true love. if that's where your gravitational pull comes from. The only thing you can ever think about is just making the jokes work. It's weird. You don't think long term. You think show to show. You know, you think gig to gig. So to that point, what's driving it is comedy.

And what I'd like to do with this show is just get it bigger and make it something that will allow us to cross-pollinate in that Tonight Show era way. Talking about the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. Because the thing that made that show great was obviously, you know, funny. But it was such a. hang. And everybody could hang. And everybody at home felt like they were a part of it because they were continuing cast to characters that you grew with. And I think ultimately that's what good TV and good radio are. It's companionship. I make this point a lot. But I mean,

I completely agree. But I never thought of Carson. This will sound heretical to a lot of people. I never thought of him as a comedian. Or as a host, you know, he was some kind of avatar. He was some sort of cipher, right, for the viewer. Yeah. When he did Carnac, when he did all these bits, it's the old, I think he's trying to amuse himself. Yeah. You know? Oh, absolutely.

I think he's just doing it for McMahon or maybe for Doc or maybe, you know, for a woman somewhere. You know, no. Or several. I mean, you know. What he was at his core, for real, because I watch the hell out of him. And I watch old Dean Martin roasts because I'm fascinated. by how stars come off in a room of stars. Wow, that's so interesting.

You know, I'm so fascinated with that idea of, you know, 35 of the biggest stars in the world are in the room. Who's interesting in the room? It's not Hollywood Squares. Yeah, exactly. Again, nine of them. Yeah, it's crazy. Right.

So what he was at his core was just such an undeniable star. Like you said, you didn't see him as a comedian. Yeah, I see him as a presenter, you know, was a who had an incredible, ungodly amount of likeability. He was just very likable. I see him as a kid from Nebraska who was a magician. I mean, if you think about his career in terms of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, if you think about the next magic trick as a joke, as an event with a beginning

and a middle and an end. And he also said something once, Jimmy, that really stuck with me, which was, you know, I'm going to be back tomorrow. Yeah. I'm going to be sitting right here tomorrow. Maybe next to me is Robert Mitchum. Maybe it's Shelley Winters. Maybe it's Gene Hackman.

They'll come and they'll go off to do whatever they do and I'll be here again. And so there was such a confidence and back to two ears and one mouth. He was a very generous interviewer. Absolutely. Because you know what the key to being a good host is you're not there to compete with your guests. One thing I'm getting used to now on my own show is going to commercial on their laugh. because I always have one to add. Oh, man, dude, write that down, Chuck.

That is, I mean, never mind comedy. But here I am interrupting you to make the very point we're bemoaning. I was thinking that, but I didn't want to say it. Stop it. I appreciate it. But no, it's why does every host on Fox and every other thing ask a question at the very end of the interview that the guest can't possibly answer? Yeah. They'll pose it.

Six seconds to go. Your thoughts. Yeah, your thoughts. 83 people are dead in a Cambodian village. Your thoughts. Your thoughts. And right. Well, and now we're gone. Yeah, we're out.

Well, I think what happens a lot, I think the challenge of TV for real, it's different for me doing comedy. I would imagine news is a monster in this way. Like, in comedy, they're just giving you time. They're like, you got 30 seconds rap. But in news, they're actually giving you information in real time. And they're giving you 30 seconds. And they're giving you don't lean forward.

You know, I think there's a lot happening. Yeah. That's why I'm always curious. when you see three people on a set together and one of them looks like he hates the guy next to him, if he's actually just viscerally reacting to what's happening in his ear

because they might be giving him a directive of like, we're going to go to the 82 people or dead in the Cambodian village sod. And in his ear he's like, there's six seconds left. But he can't say the words because he's on TV so he makes a face that goes,

there's six seconds left. But the other guy's talking. He's like, oh, this guy hates this guy. No, no, they're fighting in the parking lot after this. So I think this is something a lot of people don't get and this is for real.

If we were going to get to the true Carson superpower, okay? What he understood is that if you have this orbit of stars that come on your show and destroy, your star increases by default. You don't need to be the funniest kind of show. You are the host of the thing that is the bug light for joy. Here's Johnny. And they go, oh, joy! And they know whoever's common is going to bring a basket of joy with them.

So by default, every time, like, Wickels just annihilates the room. Okay, Johnny doesn't even attempt to compete with it, but he's the beneficiary because he's the guy who made Rickles. He's the guy who brought him on. So the thing I'm trying to be mindful of right now, because I'm booking a lot of people that don't appear anywhere on the channel. That was our decision because we really want to disarm the viewer and we want the show to have its own universe. So 99.9% of the PBC in the show, you won't recognize. Okay. And then we have like people you would recognize that will never have on again.

No offense. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But the point is, okay, because the audience is only seeing them once a week and they're new, you want to give them room to make plays. So that's been the biggest challenge so far is you don't want to over-program the show because every time you have to read comics on set and you have to set up a new story with a new sod or here's a package of me interviewing people on Times Square.

They don't have the ball. So I think is a good host, giving the ball. Because if you're booking interesting guests by default, they want to come hang out. Asat is an SOT. It means sound on tape. Good job. Is that what it means? I didn't even,

no, I'm kidding. That's the host. Do you know what an IFB actually stands for? I don't know what it stands for, but I know what it is. Give it to me. It's an interruptible foldback. That's what that earpiece is called. Yeah.

And to your earlier point, it's a terrifying thing. You know, like anybody who's seen broadcast news understands what can happen. It's almost like a ventriloquist. Yeah. You know, a producer in your ear saying things, they come out of your mouth. on the one hand, we think of that as a very unique skill. On the other hand, it's potentially the most emasculating thing that could ever happen to you. It makes you exponentially dumber and dumber and dumber.

And then all of a sudden, when the voice goes away, you're just a meatbag. Say something intelligent. Quick. Yeah. Anyway, like all of those things, I said, I don't know if I said this to you when we were talking. I might have, because it's a mantra, but production is the enemy of authenticity. For sure. And all the stuff you want is.

isn't possible without production, but all of the production you have is in the way of the stuff you want. A hundred percent. Make sense of that. Okay, I've noticed this in like staging a TV show. Okay, as a comedian, you know how comedy works. It's atmospheric.

Okay, you know that when you go to a stand-up show where let's say you watch an opening monologue on a tonight show, okay? It's shot at a certain distance because if the joke is on top of you, it's not comedy now. It's a little more aggressive, it's not relaxed. and you don't have that periphery, you don't get the guy and his energy and his orbit.

You also might get the guy from an angle that's not as true energy. One of the challenges I'm fighting for right now is give me full body shots if I'm standing up so you see me, I move. You know, there's an energy to that. If you just cut me right here, nine times out of ten, I look like the guy who sold the most cars at the dealership that month and they're letting him read the commercial. So even if I'm funny, yeah, even if I'm funny and I'm writing a good joke, I'm like, but I'm not packaged right. And I realize that's where the challenge of production lies, is it's they need to have these things for the show to look good. But in order for comedy to flourish, it flourishes in a very specific manner.

You need to have enough room, enough latitude in how they're presenting you. So that's been the challenge so far. It's like I know how to do the show because I know the vibe I'm going for. But in terms of packaging the show, that's the thing you have to adjust to. I don't mean for this to sound like advice because you don't need any. Stop it. But let me tell you what saved my career. in the second season of dirty jobs.

We just called it the truth cam, which was basically a behind-the-scenes camera. And it allowed me to tell the viewer every moment of frustration that I was feeling. That's funny. Like if the battery dies or a plane flies over. Or, I mean, any, you know, all of the things that constantly happen

that haven't yet broken your spirit, but one day will, you can take the air out of that tire by finding a camera and I think communing a little bit with the viewer and saying, okay, this is, they actually want to get a reverse angle of a shot that we know we're never going to use. Okay? So like, if you can get away with saying that and then cutting it in the show, even if it's

just in the credits. This is my favorite thing in the world because, so again, this being in the infancy stages, I've had my first experience with this. It was when I interviewed you. So I got to the set, there's two cameramen there. And he's like, well, so you're going to go. walk in from the right, Mike's going to like repel down. I'm like, no, no, no, no, you're going to point a camera at me. I'm going to make a joke about me and Mike. He's going to say hello and we're

going to have a conversation. I'm like, we want to shoot some B-roll on the way out of us walking around. We can. I was like, but for comedy to happen, for this interview to seem genuine, we're going to authentically do it. But you are going to go as far as you want to go. I'm telling you, every single person I've ever talked to in this business either understands that or they don't. Yeah. But the thing is, you weren't a dick about it. Yeah.

You were nice to your people. Because your people are doing what they're good at and what they know. And you can't win without them. You can't. Yep. But it's not 1979 and it's not this old house, right? And Taylor and I were just laughing about this. Like there's a huge amount of inertia in production to say, okay, yeah, we're going to go over here now and see what Norm is doing with the refrigerator.

Right. And so close shot of the feet walking, insert of the hand turning the knob, reverse of the whole thing. What's going on on YouTube today? Mr. Beast is going, I'm going to dig a pit and drive a train in it. And a second later, you see a train going to get a pit. Everybody who crashed has an hour to spend a million dollars. Right.

So one day you wake up in everything you think you know is wrong or changing. Yeah. Whether it's driving a cab or being a cop or impersonal. a host or trying to get a show on the air or writing a book, like the rules of everything are changing, including the business of cancellation. Yep. So as we start to think about maybe landing this plane in the next two hours, right? I'm having fun, though.

All right. Well, look, you stay as long as you want. What time is it, Chuck? Because among my many New Year's resolutions was not to talk. You're trying to please me a little bit? Yeah, well, so far, we're at 51 minutes. Oh, this is great. Glorious.

Yeah. Great. Goodbye. Make it all makes sense through the lens of cancellation, fear and loathing. Because that's kind of where I feel like so many people are. That's where they find themselves. I do think people, and I think this is the fault of the smartphone, I think people are now being held hostage in a way by convenience.

Honestly, I think that's the biggest challenge facing the world right now is nuanced. takes an extra 15 seconds. We're now living in a world where if you want a video on your phone that needs to go to space and bounce off a satellite and come back to your phone, okay, if that takes two seconds,

you don't get a grace period to get to space and back anymore. So imagine if someone hears your point politically and goes, yeah, but, okay, you're like, if he could catch fire. You know what I mean? You're done with him. You don't have time for the inconvenience of this.

And I think that's where the smartphone and basically instant gratification of kind of upended society. It's done in two ways. One, we're impatient, but two, we don't value content anymore because it's too easy to acquire. You used to get music by going to a store

and then freeing it from a security device that had two stickers on it. It was locked into a plastic crate that they had to unlock. By the way, can we just send the guy who ran Sam Goody to the southern border? He's going to secure the border. A couple of stickers, a plastic crate.

Don't build a wall. Build a Sam Goody. build a tower records. We're out of here. You're welcome. So the point is, you had to physically acquire joy in ways that are now cheapened by the fact that if I want a song,

I can buy it at 97 miles an hour on Route 80 by hitting a button on my phone. And for that reason, we just want what we want when we want it. And if we can't have it, I guess it wasn't that important anyway, so I'll find a new thing to want. And I think that's where cancel culture got its power.

Okay. It can't succeed if we're having a nuanced conversation. But it can succeed if it's convenient to be a part of. Meaning if you got at bed tomorrow and everybody's made a Jerry from FedEx because he said something off color about one of his customers and we're all tweeting, you know, that's it for Jerry from FPS for me. No more FedEx. FedEx is like, hey, boss, we got a problem here and they fire Jerry. And then three days later, you find out Jerry had raised $2.5 billion for a charity this person was affiliated with. You saw a clip of the content out of context. But nobody goes back to save Jerry.

but more importantly, they don't go back to save the rest of us. It becomes a way of life because where cancel culture succeeds, and this is the danger of Twitter as a whole, it's incentivized conflict. And what I mean by that is if you get on Twitter and you're like, yeah, me and Jimmy had fun today, I got a few likes. But if you're like, Jimmy's a white supremacist dirtbag and I don't know what he was doing on my show,

much higher yield. And because that yield comes with digital dopamine, in this case would be likes, that's what people got addicted to. The rage mob feeds off digital dopamine. because we talked about virtue signaling, but that's what's scoring them the high. Hey, okay, I care about the black community. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

We got this chick on a syrup bottle, Aunt Jermima. Okay, her family's been getting 130 years worth of royalties. I'm going to cut her family out of royalty checks. Progress. Yeah, okay, the pancakes aren't racist anymore. Yeah. Okay, the school's failing. Well, school's not even open because I was during the pandemic.

And your crimes through the roof. But think of the pancakes. Think of the inclusion in our breakfast bread. They did that to Mrs. Butterworth. So the point is a lot of it isn't... Sambo? Yeah, Uncle Ben. Do do, do, do, do do do do do.

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to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash Mike. That's skills, USA.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.S.S.S. USA. Uncle Ben. The story of Uncle Ben is like the greatest story in the book when you think about how stupid this is. So Uncle Ben's rice, right? As two guys founded it, they named the company after a farmer in Texas, not a slave, a farmer who was famous for a grain of rice that was wildly

popular. He didn't want to be the face of the thing because he was a farmer. This wasn't reality TV yet where you knew where you wanted to be. You belonged in the field. I'm not going in front of I don't want to know about it. Okay. So Uncle Ben, rather than being the guy who made it, they were like, okay, well, we're going to hire a guy. And they met a Chicago waiter. His name was Frank Brown. And I'm like, you're going to be the face. He was a really funny, affable guy. You're going to be the face of Uncle Ben. So they hired that guy to be the face. His family received royalties. The former received whatever he received as a kickback or an homage, whatever the hell it was. And then one day 2020 came along and again. They were like, well, we want to help the

black community. So the way to do it is to stop paying this black family their money. Yeah, that'll fix it. But that's what this is. When you're having a conversation devoid, okay, of every factor in the cancellation, it's easy to succeed because it's convenient. You go, oh, we're getting likes today for saying Uncle Ben is racist. All right, well, screw you Uncle Ben. Oh, Mrs. Butterworth is, you know, whatever. And that convenience is what denies us a full-throated conversation. So in my book, it's an A to Z, okay, in that every letter represents something that was canceled. But I tell you the full story of how this thing came to be, how it actually caught the wrong end of the fire in the news cycle,

and what the fallout was afterwards. And basically the claim I'm trying to make, and I think it's made well, it's a lot of what we talked about today, when you start lighting society on fire, like a cultural arsonist, picking fires and places where we traditionally agreed, the people who suffer the most are us.

Give you one more example. San Francisco, during the pandemic, okay, they wanted to take Abraham Lincoln's name off a high school. Okay, because they had decided he didn't do enough. And I got to be honest, his resumes go, okay? Pretty good one. Pretty good one. Abe Lincoln on LinkedIn is getting a lot of messages, a lot of, a lot of, from BET Network, no less.

I mean, Abe Lincoln has a, you know, pretty good resume. But a San Francisco school wanted to take Abraham Lincoln's name off, which is, of course, preposterously stupid. But now imagine me, my son is named Lincoln. In 2008, in a million years, what I have thought, okay, because I was driving a cab on the Upper West Side. I actually named him Lincoln so he wouldn't get beat up at the Black Public High School. That was the hook. I was like,

we're making private school money here. He is Lincoln Jefferson Davis. I'm kidding. You cast a line. Lincoln, sojourner, truth, Harriet Tubman, Phila. Ladies and gentlemen. I'm trying to make this work here.

Kids are going to need help. But imagine now that whenever I'm in San Francisco, he has to go by his middle name, O.J. And, but the point is, we're fighting the wrong battles. And that's what this book is about. It's that we used to have areas of what I call common culture.

You literally never for a second turned on a baseball game, a comedy show, or a movie to figure out how this was going to affect the next election. But now you can't get away from it. I've made this point a lot lately because it's the one that resonates with me the most

about how my life has changed and society has changed with it. So forgive me if you've heard this on TV because it's a serious point, but it's ridiculous. When I was a little kid, I was born in 1976 in Levittown. Okay, I have white parents, cops. Pennsylvania? New York.

Oh, New York. I was in the O.J. Pennsylvania happens. We talk about behind the musics. Yeah. Okay, they haven't gotten in trouble for the tax evasion yet. Right. You know, it's coming.

It's coming. But I think about this as a little kid. Like, I grew up at an era where I had white parents who would yell at me for eating too much ice cream. And now my Ben and Jerry's ice cream yells at me for having white parents. It's like, I'm telling you, we're doing it wrong. That's the point.

Like, this was not supposed to be the case. If ice cream is not an autonomous zone, like, what do we have left? Like, nothing. So the point I'm trying to make to everybody is this book is not like a call to arms. Like, it's just a call to chill out. Because I think... Well, it's a survival guide. It is.

You're defining the basics. You know, I think at some point in this, I forget where, but you write very cleverly. If it ain't woke, don't fix it. Thank you. It just seems like such a recent obsession. Yep. But I also think it's important to say that I don't think you're advocating for an absence of consequences. No.

You want people to, you know, maybe suffer is the wrong word, but to at least endure or experience the consequences of their words. I mean, part of me, you know, when I watch the whole Bud Light thing, I don't participate in boycotts. I've been boycotted before. I think it's a, you know, whatever. But did I delight in it a little bit? Yeah, kind of. I kind of did. Because I thought, well, what are you guys thinking?

There's six, like, beers that I can buy in this bar. They're not a dime worth of difference between them. Are you really going to ask me to make a choice based on that position? Yeah. And when they said, yeah, we are. I thought, okay, good for you. Natural light. Haven't had one in a while.

Where you've been, girlfriend? Right. So where do you draw that line between a comedian who says a really stupid thing or not stupid? Unfunny. Yeah. You're not advocating against the consequences of being unfuny. Well, what I think is because people conflate cancellations with like, oh, they violated freedom. They're not.

Freedom of speech means the government won't arrest you. Okay, you can absolutely lose your job if you defy the sensibilities of your employer. And I'm on board with that. For your audience. Yeah, for sure. And I absolutely get that aspect of this. What I think I'm arguing for in the book is like sentencing guidelines because it basically became just a quest for like a digital pound of flesh.

Somebody committed a personal foul. All right, well, end their career. And it's a joke because their careers always come back in eight months. But as I was saying earlier, we do consider that a front to now be something the rest of us can't do. Now, if this is criminal or it's malicious, then yes, it should be prosecuted. But for the most part, all I was going to say is, My biggest challenge right now, and this is the thing I'm trying to push back against,

and I want big corporations to get this, okay, is we're all in the fun business. That's what we all do. If we were to die tomorrow, we would wish we had more fun today. We wouldn't wish we fought more on Twitter. We wouldn't wish we inserted more, you know, diversity initiatives into our content that has nothing to do with it. And I think that's the biggest challenge for corporate America right now is, you know, we used to have mad men, okay, who catered to the customer's preferences. But now a lot of corporations in Bud Light's case are mad them.

You know what I mean? Where they're not trying to cater to your preferences. They're trying to change them. And I think that's where Disney got into trouble. It's like you alienated your customer base and there was no gain. Okay, the world doesn't get better. It becomes a little more divisive. And you might get the branding patch of saying, hey, we're aligned with this thing, which is wonderful, fine.

But at the end of the day, you can't really lecture me about inclusion if it's $150 to get in. you know, because there's a lot of people, including cab driver Jimmy Phelan that ain't going to the park if it's 150. But I'm still paying interest on a hot pretzel I bought on Main Street in 2012. It's like the sign you must be this tall to get on the ride. It must be this rich. You must be right. I mean, as metaphors go, I think we're going to be hard pressed to beat behind the music. Because everything about what we just talked about is, are you curious enough to peel the layers back?

And are you patient enough to take the time to look at the consequences, both intended and otherwise, to get to the root of a thing? Behind the music as a show did that. It starts with the premise that you know the song. But do you remember Chuck and behind the music? How many of these ended with like, this happened? And then that happened.

And then, can I do it? Do it, go ahead. Which ultimately led to the demise of the band. you could pick any band but somehow the drummer had a thing right with the bassist, wife and ultimately led to the demise of the band.

So can I give you where the conversation takes me when you talk about the other side of this arc for me? Okay, and this really matters. So growing up in a family full of cops, my favorite thing to do is my dad would have cops over from time to time that eat a stick of pepperoni and Drake Meister Brow, because we were bowling.

And they would tell crazy cop stories. Sure. And it was the most fascinating thing to be a part of because it would roll on into the night, two, three in the morning. And you were an eight-year-old kid in it. Like, you could stay up, you could hear it. You were in this other, again, to a point of an autonomous zone place, where we all understood this wasn't normal for you,

but, you know, it was a nice communal thing in the backyard. So I used to listen to cop stories. And I've always thought from my youth that you're living your life for the version of you that goes back to the yard, has no forward-facing obligations anymore, and can tell all the crazy things that happened to you to people who might find them interesting. So the thing that really does indemnify me

against the fear of being canceled or my career tanking is at my core. I would love, love, truly love, because I married a farm girl from the Midwest from Ohio. Great feet. There you go. Hey, girl. They're not hers.

On sale now. They're not hers. Yeah, well, thanks for that. You just millie-vinillyed my feet-pick game. Don't listen to them. Girl, you know it's true. So I would love at some point, because this will only be real when it's over. You know what I mean?

So I'd love to be in a backyard and a McMansion in the middle of nowhere, okay, telling these stories to people and my child and stuff and just bottoming out. I'm not scared. Do you realize what you just did? Let's go back to your fifth grade teacher. Mrs. Pascana. She told you to go home and watch the Tonight Show, but the show was already going on with your pop and his cop buddies coming over. Oh, yeah, big time.

You are the Tonight Show. You had it in your backyard. You had it in your house. You had it on your TV. I'm really pulling for you, man, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because you were nice to that makeup girl when nobody was looking. And you were nice to your crew when they were telling you to do some stupid stuff. Really stupid, though.

Really stupid stuff, right? Yeah. But so, like, you know better, but you still have whatever it is that's got you on this path. And I guess in the interest of why we're really here, what's the show called and when can we see it? It is. Fox News Saturday night with Jimmy Fallow, Saturday night's 10 p.m. on the Fox News channel. And if one of you were to watch, you would double our ratings. I've seen both episodes.

Have you? Stop it. No. And I'm still on the show. Yeah, no, it's great. I want to say something about your book, though. Okay. Because the great thing about this book is that,

when just the way you're talking right now is how it's written. You're how it reads. Right? It's like, I mean, I've seen you on Fox before this show, appearances on Gutfeld, stuff like that. And the way you talk, it's like, I cannot read this book without hearing your voice. That's funny that you say that.

100%. It's a high compliment to me because it's so important, I think. Consider the source, you know. No, but it is so important to create the atmosphere in which like your way of thinking and joking can flourish. and what I told them at the very beginning of this. And they were like, yeah, we want to put out a book and throw your name on it.

Do you want to write it? You could get a ghost writer. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. I'm not telling you I'm Hemingway, but I sound like I hang out at a bar named Hemingway. I'm like, if you get a ghost writer, we will have ripped off the world. And they would feel so defrauded by that,

so I'm so glad I got to do it. Your fans will know in a second. Oh, in a second. And you'd look terrible for it. And that's what I think the key to longevity and survival is, and this is where you're conquering the world. This is what you are. You can't fake this thing.

You're stuck in that. Like I'm stuck in this. This is what we are. I'm stuck in this thing. I'm just driving around in a 76 fail-up. That's what it is. AI being what it is. You can fake it for a while.

Yeah. And maybe even today you can fake it for longer than you used to be able to fake it. But you can't fake it forever. And when it comes crashing down, man, it makes a hell of a racket. Thanks for coming up. Yeah, I was sorry, but really, it's the Council Culture Dictionary, is it number one with a bullet, and A to Z guide to winning the war on fun, which is something that you brought up. You know, we've got to win the war on fun.

Okay, the way you win the war on fun, by the way, is by not fighting it. You know, it's addition by subtraction. The next time somebody gets mad and goes, you know, I didn't like that thing. Who cares? Yeah. Great. You didn't like, great. People are getting bombed on the other side of the world.

And we're like, you know, someone told a joke at a show I wasn't at last night. And that's hateful. So like, let's get them fired. And they're like, were you there? No, I watched that. Well, I was looking at a video of my stomach. And we've lost our way. You're not going to beat, just put the macaroni and cheese back, or just keep walking.

No, that's all it is. You don't have to put the stuff you hate on your plate. Life is not one size fits all. That's it. And that's what everybody's getting wrong. They think one sensibility should define consumption. And it can't. And if you don't believe me, go to a porn site.

Good night, everybody. Jimmy Failing, he's one of the good guys His wife has enormous feet He seems pretty nice as well Go Jenny His kid is Lincoln named after I don't, I'm not even sure

But he's gonna be fine The car Thanks man I'm man This episode is over now I hope it was worthwhile Sorry it went on so long But if it made you smile

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